By Neil Connery
On a bridge in Sana’a a crowd gathers around the aftermath of another airstrike by the Saudi-led coalition overnight.
Their faces peer through the large hole punched through the road. Two lives were claimed here, they tell me.
In the flats above the floor is covered in broken glass. The wall is covered with blood stains.
Fatthi Al-Romaim shows me around his children’s blown out bedroom. There’s debris at every turn and much of it on top of his son’s bed covering his Mickey Mouse duvet.
He tells me how he ran to their room when he heard the jets to save his two sons Habib, 10, Ismail, 6, and his daughter Tasbin, 4.
There are large pieces of glass embedded in the wall just above where Ismail’s head was resting.
"I ran as fast as I could. I gathered them all up in my arms. There was glass everywhere and a big noise," he tells me, still shaking from what he’s just survived.
Fatthi managed to rescue his children. His arm was injured by the blast. He carefully picks up the family photograph with its shattered glass. He managed to save them, but there’s no escape from the trauma of these airstrikes.
At Sana’a airport, the bombed out wreckage of aircraft litters the apron. Yemen’s isolation from the world beyond couldn’t be any clearer. There’s no respite from the darkness engulfing the Arab world’s poorest nation.
We spent a week in Yemen travelling around seeing the terrible toll this war has taken. In the mangled metal that used to be the market stalls in Mastaba near the Saudi border they were still finding human remains when we arrived.
A Saudi-led coalition airstrike here two weeks earlier had killed 119 people, 24 of them children.
Matanya Basha’s anger overwhelms her as she tells me she lost her husband Zagir and her two sons Khalid and Ali in the bombing.
"We don’t have weapons but they kill our men and our children. They destroyed everything and now we have nothing. Why did they target us, we are poor people," she cries out.
The Saudi-led coalition says it was targeting Houthi fighters they’ve been at war with now for more than a year. They say they’ve launched an investigation into what happened.
On the other side of the road from the deadliest attack of this war so far there’s a sign warning of the dangers of unexploded bombs. It stands almost unscathed by the blast.
In Hajjah Hosptial we found some of those injured. Hassan Mahbesh’s face and neck were badly burned away. His five-year-old son Yahir was killed in the airstrike.
"We are civilians not soldiers. We are not armed. They blow us up out of nowhere. What’s the reason?" He asks.
More than 6,500 people have been killed in this war - half of them civilians. The United Nations says most are victims of airstrikes from the Saudi-led coalition. The UK’s arms sales to the Saudi military are coming under focus as the civilian toll mounts.
As we travel away from Mustaba, the aftermath of other airstrikes can be seen. As we film less than 20 miles from the Saudi border, jets from the coalition roar past us in the skies high above.
Those forced to flee the border area now face a new fight - survival. More than 2.5 million people have fled their homes across Yemen during the war. Many are living in makeshift camps.
In one camp supported by Oxfam, the humanitarian crisis facing Yemen is becoming clear. Omabdullah holds her son Salim close to her. The 18-month-old is suffering from severe acute malnutrition.
"I have no food to feed my son. He’s been sick for a month and it’s getting worse," she said.
Nearby, Mousa, who’s 13, cradles his baby brother Mojahed who is also battling against severe acute malnutrition.
"We are scared of airstrikes but we are also scared of hunger. Life here is so difficult," he tells me.
Source: itv, Edited by Website Team
